Memorial to the Name
by aliarose
Summary: After the end, who will remember?


Title: A Memorial to the Name  
  
Author: alianora  
  
Email: alia@silverspiral.net  
  
Spoilers: S1  
  
Summery: After the end, who will remember?  
  
~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
Nameless, faceless, they line up by the wall, waiting for their turn to speak. He stands in front of them, hearing their stories one by one, at times scribbling furiously, others merely watching.  
  
He never speaks, just listens, watching them one by one as they relate their tale, and then vanish. This one looks him straight in the eyes; that one stares at past his ear. Some mumble, others shout.  
  
Mundane details mixed with the incredible power of life. Born this day, that day, the 4th of March, in Colorado, or Georgia, or New Mexico. Fell in love, out of love, in hate, into life. Fragments of daily life, details, recipes, poems. It all comes pouring into him. This is what makes a life.  
  
This is what makes history.  
  
The whole of human history trickles down to the lives he hears, the stories he commits to memory so they are not lost.  
  
Until they gain their faces and names. Until they are whole again.  
  
He can do that much. He can remember.  
  
And as long as he remembers, they live.  
  
The children are the worst. They smile, and tell him about balloons, and climbing trees, and birthday parties. How one boy liked to tug his neighbor's pigtails, and she would screech, and chase him on the playground. Wide-eyed babies, too young to speak, had their stories too; full of love and mother's coo, or frightened and crying and abandoned.  
  
He heard them all.  
  
Most could not tell their story on their own. The color of his wife's favorite dress escaped one man, and he could not continue. Shards of memory surround the listener, and he must piece them together to get the full picture. Always, there were pieces missing. Details of how she liked her coffee, or his bad habit of biting his fingernails. These were left out.  
  
How could they not be? The listener was only one, and one can only hold so much.  
  
But it's the details that make up the life.  
  
He can be told a name, a birthday, and a job. Yes, he says, but who are you really? How do you like your eggs? What is your favorite book? What are your dreams?  
  
Why?  
  
They fade into mist, and he puzzles out what is left. He goes home every day exhausted and aching.  
  
Others think he is crazy. Stop, he is told. Those people are dead. What can you do? It doesn't matter now. They're already dead.  
  
But it matters deeply to him.  
  
He is searching through the rubble of other's lives because those people mattered to someone, someplace. As he might matter to someone. As she mattered, still matters, to him.  
  
He started this for her.  
  
He lost her, and has been trying to find her ever since. He can tell you a lot about her. Her hair color, favorite food, bad habits, nightmares, daydreams; everything he can remember. He can tell you what he wanted for her, what she told him she wanted for herself. But he realized after he lost her, that he did not have her completely. There were parts of her he never touched.  
  
When they cleaned out her room, minutes before he was supposed to leave and did not, he found a dusty picture under her bed. She was laughing at the camera, wearing a too big cowboy hat and roller skates. She was missing her two front teeth, and could not have been more than eight.  
  
That picture fascinated him. Who took it? When? Why was she dressed like that?  
  
He would have said, before that, that he knew everything there was to know about her.  
  
He wanted to know all of her, so he began tracking down the missing pieces. He found one in the County Clerk's Office of Records, where he saw her birth certificate and learned her father's name. He found another piece in a trucker who always sat in her section, where he heard she tried to run away when she was twelve and was found hiding in the trucker's cab with a half a peanut butter sandwich and a ratty plush dog.  
  
The shards of her life were everywhere, and he wanted to cling to every sliver.  
  
As he searched for her, he discovered others who were fragmented and in danger of being lost.  
  
That is how he finds himself here. Day after day, searching through reams of papers, calling total strangers and meeting others. His hunt takes him to cemeteries, restaurants, golf courses, and movie theaters. Disjointed parts of other's lives are dusted off, pushed into place, and give the faceless names and lives.  
  
These people were here. They were not just a name and a date of death. They laughed and loved and cried and lived.  
  
The ones around him do not want to see it. They turn their heads, roll their eyes, and talk over the lost one's names.  
  
They cannot accept that they had anything to do with their deaths.  
  
A war was fought here, and people died. Innocents, conspirators, lovers, and crazies; all were killed in a war that had so little to do with them.  
  
Most of the others have gone home. Left him there with his notebooks and his fragments, turned their backs on the ones who were lost. But some remain. They help him locate the puzzle pieces hidden inside dusty, crumbling papers and fit the shards into place.  
  
And soon, the whole universe will know, at least, anyone who cares to look.  
  
For every fragment he finds, he writes down. He laboriously has been writing the whole of human history from these individual chronicles. Their legends will live on.  
  
Everyone will know the names and birthdays and favorite cartoons of the dead. A requiem, written in his cramped, backward writing, given for all those who were lost along the way to his own freedom. Page after page of lives, loves, tears, and death.  
  
This is how human history is made. One person fights to remember, and so tells another, and another and another. These people were not great military leaders, or famous kings. These were everyday people, as was she. Was she special? Yes, but only to him. Now, he will make her, and thousands of other everyday people, special to the entire universe.  
  
Everyone will know what was lost, given up, abandoned, in their own mad search for power, for control of this pitiful planet and their own lives. They will weep for the innocents, cry out for the children, and mourn the mad.  
  
Everything, everyone must be remembered.  
  
As this is how history is written.  
  
~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
"Yad Vashem, a memorial for the Holocaust, is in Jerusalem. It has a whole library that catalogs the names of the six million martyrs. Not only did the library have their names, it also had where they lived, were born, anything that could be found out about them. These people existed and they mattered. Yad Vashem...means "memorial to the name." It was not nameless masses that were slaughtered; they were human beings."  
-Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg 


End file.
